Monday, 14 May 2012

Immigration error in your favour, win one visa [update]

Immigration New Zealand had a minor screw-up: where the Silver Fern Visa scheme lets in 300 young skilled people every year and gives them nine months to find a job, Immigration sent emails to 306 people above the quota limit saying their application had been successful. So Immigration New Zealand did the right thing and gave them all visas; it's hard to imagine INS doing the same thing in the States.

I'd love it if they followed up both cohorts. If success rates between the selected cohort and the "oops" cohort are roughly comparable, then we should probably consider increasing the quota. If there's a substantial difference between the selected cohort and the "oops" cohort, then Immigration's been doing a good job in picking the ones who are most likely to turn out to be winners.

I'm assuming here that the top 300 were the most qualified or the highest scoring 300, and the "oops" cohort were the next batch down. I wonder if Immigration New Zealand would provide the data a year from now. It would make another fun future honours project.

Update: Dave, in comments below, says it was a pure time-based allocation. So we can't get anything useful from tracking the two cohorts. Even if the cohorts have the same outcomes, that says nothing about what the first cohort would have done were there less competition. Ah well.